Jimific from 1stWebDesigner has always had a passion and love for alternative education. In fact that’s the only way he has learned anything in his life, including online technology for more than 8 years. And now he believes he owes it to others to show what they are truly capable of, without realizing it.

]]>The client that you choose to take on defines you. Most of the problems in work can be avoided by taking the time to choose a client carefully. This means, you should know what you want out of your client relationships. Psychological approach is an effective strategy that can be used to read your clients’ personality.

This is not an easy process when you are starting out. You will hear all kinds of advice about choosing a client but it really takes time and experience to make it good.

So in today’s post, you will learn the different types of WordPress Web design clients. I will share my views about handling and managing each one. Here it goes:

Type 1 – Always in a hurry

This type of client wants you to be available at the moment’s notice. They are usually anxious and don’t really know what they need. They want you to make a ‘best in the world’ website, but want you to complete it by tomorrow.

These clients’ don’t have any idea about the work that is on their part for making the website complete. They will want you to read their minds and get it done as soon as you can.

How to Handle:

Try to never give a guarantee regarding timelines to such type of clients. Be ready for any last minute revisions. Keeping your original layered design unbroken is a good idea because it will allow you to easily refine and modify it afterwards.

Type 2 – Wants everything ‘simple’

This type of client doesn’t think about the work and money required to add additional features to the website. They will often say ‘I want a really simple website’ but ‘simple’ is far from what they want you to make.

They will ask you questions like: Can you build a forum and quizzes so I can engage with visitors on site? Can you get orders from WooCommerce purchases sent to my in-store POS system?

How to Handle:

You need to give them an exact figure of how many dollars they will need to pay for getting it done. Tell them when the project gets too big, it can cause the website to slow down. If you are keeping elements in small size, they will go faster.

Type 3 – The client who never reads

This type of client will not read emails, look at the examples you send, and open the attachments. They will answer a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to your question, which could be interpreted in multiple ways.

They don’t really know what they want, so they find it difficult to answer your questions. Also, they will get stressed when you send them too much work to read.

How to Handle:

For starters, you should shorten your emails and give them small tasks to do. But before you proceed with your task, get a final ‘go-ahead’ from them in written form. They may blame you if they don’t like something in the website later on.

Type 4 – The Control Freak

This type of client wants to manage every detail of the project regardless of the qualifications. No decisions will be made until a personal stamp of approval is given. Expect that your workflow will be constantly disturbed. The reason? These clients may believe that you lack dedication, therefore, they need to control your work.

YOu can hear statements like ‘I know what is best for the project and what is not’. ‘I am the only one keeping the project on track’.

How to Handle:

Making an argument with these clients will drain you for sure. You need to think what’s best for you here. Do you want to drop the project? Or do you want to please the clients, do as they say, collect the paycheck and move on?

Type 5 – The Perfect Client

These clients will be the best one to have. They end up with making the best websites too, because they let you do your work. They will value your role and the creative contributions that you have put in building their WordPress sites.

These clients are timely with payments and responses. They will put their full confidence in your abilities so that you work trouble free.

How to Handle:

The only thing you need to handle here is the communication, really! Everything will go the way you thought it will. Hang on to these clients as they are rare to find.

Conclusion

Everything that we discussed comes down to ‘communication’. If your contract is clear about all the expectations that your client can have from you, it will avoid any confusion between both. Feel free to give your opinions in the below comment section.

PS Excerpt

In the WordPress field, you will encounter different types of clients. But the ability to handle those clients is what defines you. Here are some of clients that you will come across!

Author information

Jimific

Jimific from 1stWebDesigner has always had a passion and love for alternative education. In fact that’s the only way he has learned anything in his life, including online technology for more than 8 years. And now he believes he owes it to others to show what they are truly capable of, without realizing it.

Charles Mburugu is a professional blogger who likes sharing tips for internet marketers and bloggers. Currently, he is working with MotoCMS.

]]>WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that is popular with many bloggers all over the world. Not only is it easy to install, but it comes with great features which makes it very user-friendly. Overall WordPress is a great solution to manage content, however there are some common mistakes that should be avoided when starting out. Let’s take a look.

1. Choosing poor quality themes

You need to be very careful when selecting a theme to use for your blog. Some themes, even those tagged as premium, come with malicious code which will expose your blog to attack by spammers or hackers. Therefore, before choosing a theme, take time to carry out some research. Find out if the source has a good reputation for offering quality themes. Check out reviews from people who have used the theme before. Once you have compared your options, you can then make a decision about which theme would be appropriate.

2. Not altering your permalink structure

When installed, WordPress comes with a default permalink structure for displaying post URLs. The URL of your posts will appear as yourblogname.com/?p=123. This looks very unprofessional and does not offer any SEO benefits. Therefore, it is very important to alter your alter your permalink structure to feature the name of your post. This means that your URL will appear as yourblogname.com/post-name/.

3. Failing to change the default username

The default username for WordPress blogs is ‘admin’. Hackers are aware of this and are likely to try ‘admin’ as the username when attempting to gain access to your blog. Therefore, one of the first steps towards securing your blog is to change your username to something more unique. This will help you stay a step ahead of hackers.

4. Ignoring WordPress updates

WordPress is always releasing updates for their themes and plugins. However, many users don’t realize the importance of such updates and simply ignore them, thus leaving their blogs exposed to security risks. Therefore, you should always be on the lookout for any new updates being released. With just the click of a button, you can update your WordPress installations and make your blog less vulnerable to attack.

5. Installing too many unnecessary plugins

WordPress offers numerous plugins which can make your work much easier. However, each plugin installed exposes your blog to all kinds of security risks. In addition, having too many plugins can slow down the loading speed of your blog. Therefore, before installing any plugin, make sure it is necessary.

Read reviews to find out what other people are saying about it. Install plugins one at a time and test them to verify their performance. The Plugin Performance Profiler (P3) plugin is a great tool which can be used to analyze the plugins on your blog. Any deactivated themes or plugins should be deleted from your blog right away.

6. Using images without permission

Images are an important element for any blog. They can add value to content and are also useful for attracting the attention of visitors. However, you need to be careful when selecting images to add to your blog. You could easily find yourself violating copyright laws by using images which belong to someone else. Therefore, don’t just go to ‘Google Images’ and download any photo which seems appropriate. Instead, you could visit one of the many online galleries out there which offer free or premium stock images.

7. Failing to backup your blog

WordPress blogs are continually being targeted by hackers. If you don’t backup, you might end up losing everything in the event of an attack. Therefore, to prevent such problems, you need to take the necessary measures to backup your blog. WordPress offers several free and premium plugins which can help you backup your files and databases. This includes BackWPup, VaultPress, and BackupBuddy.

Author information

CharlesM

Charles Mburugu is a professional blogger who likes sharing tips for internet marketers and bloggers. Currently, he is working with MotoCMS.

]]>Most WordPress bloggers are individuals who administer almost every single aspect of website management and content writing without needing to give other people access to their WordPress installation. They tend to use their administration account that WordPress creates by default on installation and don’t give much thought about managing other users.

When a site grows beyond a certain size, begins to accept contributions from external content creators, or is a business site that needs to give access to multiple members of staff, user permissions become an issue.

WordPress has a built-in mechanism for allowing accounts to have different levels of access. WordPress user roles and capabilities are powerful tools for creating fine grained permissions for every user account.

Today we will take a look at WordPress roles and capabilities. We will deliberate when to use them, why WordPress owners should use them, and how to manage user roles. We’ll specifically concentrate on single site WordPress installations; there are some complications concerning multisite installations that we won’t be discussing in this article.

WordPress Roles And Capabilities

WordPress user roles are used to determine which functionality a WordPress user has access to. That access is determined by the capabilities that each user role has. Capabilities can be thought of as tasks within a WordPress site. Each user role has a set of associated capabilities that specify precisely what a user account with that user role can do.

As I said, most people are familiar with the default admin account (which, for security reasons, they should remove). The account with the username “admin” is not particularly special in itself, it is a user account like any other, but it is given the user role “Administrator”, which has a broad range of capabilities associated with it. The Administrator user role is one of six that are predefined within WordPress.

The six user roles are:

Super Admin — This roles is used in multisite installations and denotes a user that has access to the administration features of all sites in a network.

Administrator — Is able to perform all administrative capabilities for a single site.

Editor — Can publish and manage the posts of all users, but doesn’t have access to other administrator capabilities.

Author — Can write and publish their own posts.

Contributor — can write their own posts, but can’t publish.

Subscriber — The lowest access level. Subscribers can only manage their own profile.

Adding New Users In WordPress

There are too many capabilities to detail in depth in this article, but they encompass almost every aspect of WordPress administration and publishing. To see the full range, take a look at the capabilities articlein the WordPress Codex.

As you can see from the list of user roles, the default setup is appropriate for blogging and other publishing sites, but not so suitable for many other business situations.

Fortunately, it’s possible to create additional user roles and associate them with a set of capabilities. This creates a very powerful way of giving precisely selected sets of abilities to different groups of users.

Managing User Roles

WordPress itself doesn’t offer a very intuitive interface for managing user roles beyond the default set, but there are plugins that provide a straightforward interface into the user roles API. Capability Manager Enhanced implements an easy-to-use interface for creating WordPress roles and changing their capabilities.

Managing User Roles With Capability Manager Enhanced

When Should You Use WordPress Roles?

One of the worst mistakes a website owner can make is to simply give everyone an Administrator account. That is extremely insecure. Each user should only be given the access they need to accomplish the tasks they are entrusted with.

For the most part, using the default set of user roles is sufficient. But, if you find that those roles don’t fit the way your site or business works or lead to you giving more permissions than are absolutely necessary — giving editors administrator roles just so they can run updates, for example — then creating new roles that better fit your needs will ensure that your site remains secure without limiting necessary access.

My interest is in writing on topics related to technology, search engine optimization and prominent UK web hosting platforms like cloud server hosting, dedicated hosting, Wordpress hosting and eCommerce hosting. I focus on providing with the best possible information to the readers that they can relate to and implement easily.

]]>It’s a known fact that WordPress is a phenomenal platform for establishing a great website or a blog. WordPress is popular because it’s user friendly and there is no technical knowledge required for using it. When it comes to planning a website and launching it, usually people prefer the wordpress hosting platform as it simplifies the website creation and maintenance process. However, at times the WordPress users encounter some issues or errors while working with WordPress.

Techniques for dealing with the common WordPress problems:

Dealing With The Plugin Issues

At times, some plugins might interfere with each other; this might create interference in the loading of your website. A very simple way to tackle this is to disable all the WordPress plugins. You can enable each plugin one by one and you can keep testing your website simultaneously so that you can identify the exact plugin that is causing the problem. The plugin issues might prevent you from logging in and accessing your dashboard, however this is a rare case scenario.

When you get to your dashboard, you can navigate to the plugins page and continue to disable and enable the plugins as mentioned above. In case you do not get the access to the WordPress dashboard, you can utilize the FTP client access in order to rename the plugins folder; this will disable all the present plugins.

Issues Related To The Theme

Some WordPress themes consist of custom functions that might lead to errors at times. In order to determine a theme based error, all you have to do is set your theme to the default one. The default theme can be activated through the dashboard. If you can accesses or work with your website or blog perfectly after reverting the theme, then you will know that there was some issue with the theme.

You can use FTP in case you don’t have the WordPress dashboard access. Through FTP, go to the – ‘themes’ folder and change the name of the current theme. As a result of this, WordPress will revert to the default theme automatically.

Issue With Modifying The Header Information

If you come across the error – ‘Cannot modify header information – headers already sent’. This error message signifies that there is an issue with the stray characters. You might not be able to spot these characters at the opening tag or the closing tag. Check the error message properly for detecting the name of the file that is generating the warning.
The file name will be mentioned at the end of the error message. You have got two choices from here. The easy way out – In case you haven’t made any prominent modifications lately, then the file containing the error message can be replaced by the backup copy.

The second option – In case you don’t have a working backup copy, you will have to download the file that is causing the issue. Once the file is downloaded, open it in a Windows notepad. This is the best option as the Windows Notepad does not create any unknown characters. Do not opt for a Word Processing Program like Microsoft Word, as it might add hidden formatting characters in the file. Ensure that the first character is <? and the last character is ?> in the file. See if there are any hidden characters present at the end of the file. For instance, you might come across unwanted spaces, in this case move the cursor to the end of the file and delete the additional spaces.

Changes That Are Not Saved

There is an easy fix to this problem. The web browser contains the copies of the cached web pages. The web pages might also be stored in the memory of your computer. As a result of frequent visits to those web pages, the page is loaded from the cache of the web browser, this page might not show the latest changes as it is an old copy. You can follow this process in order to load the web page from the server through the web browser – Open Firefox, hold CTRL and SHIFT and then press the R key. In the Internet Explorer, hold the SHIFT key and click on the refresh button. These key shortcuts might differ in accordance to the setup of your browser.

Deleting The Old Posts / Pages

Most of the WordPress users come across this issue. It has been a difficult task to narrow down on the causes of this issue because of its sporadic nature. Apparently, it seems like certain plugins affect the functioning of the deletion option. In order to deal with this issue – First perform the required deletions and then activate all the plugins.

404 File Not Found Error

When you come across this one, you will see a complete path to the missing file. The path can be tracked through FTP and then you can check if the file exists. Remember, in case you are working on a Linux server, the file names are case sensitive. For instance, Test.php is not the same as test.php; so you will have to be careful with the file names. The 404 errors usually occur as a result of the permalinks, the coding in the indexes or due to similar kind of files.

Memory Exhausted Errors

This error depicts that enough memory is not allocated for PHP in order to execute the desired actions. In order to fix this issue, adjust the memory allocation in the php.ini file. You will find the php.ini file in the default folder where WordPress is installed. In case you don’t find the file there, you will surely find it in the public_html folder. Once you find the file, copy it to the same location where WordPress is installed. Once the file is in the right place, open it in an editor. This can be done in FileManager in cPanel.

Note : You may have to keep adjusting the memory limit in order to determine the exact amount of memory that has to be allocated. In case 16M does not work, you might opt for 32M.

WordPress is a great blogging and website management platform. If you are aware of these quick fixes, your work will be simplified and achieving higher perfection will be possible!

Author information

My interest is in writing on topics related to technology, search engine optimization and prominent UK web hosting platforms like cloud server hosting, dedicated hosting, Wordpress hosting and eCommerce hosting. I focus on providing with the best possible information to the readers that they can relate to and implement easily.

Igor Ovsyannykov is a 23 year old geek, blogger, and designer. He mostly spends his time working here and sharing resourceful knowledge with others. He also enjoys weight lifting, hanging out with friends, and losing his mind to progressive house music. If you would like to reach him, send him an email to inspirationfeed@yahoo.com

]]>Are you one of the many online publishers using WordPress? As your blog or site grows you’ll need to decipher which hosting solution benefits you the most. We won’t keep you in suspense: Cloud Hosting IS the answer. This post is here to explain why.

Hello WordPress

WordPress is the ultimate in user friendly blogging and CMS platforms. The fact is, WP is an open source godsend that has made it possible for millions of people–most with little to no web design and development experience–the opportunity to customize a website to fit their needs and vision.

Themes, plugins and widgets are changing the way web newbies and techie experts alike design online content. And as WP enters into its tenth year, we should see even more developments that make publishing web content easy and accessible to the masses.

WordPress, Meet the Cloud

The term cloud is thrown around all over the place these days. It certainly wins the award for most popular marketing buzzword in 2013, anyway (funny enough, its such a buzzword it’s made the term buzzword a buzzword in the blogosphere, believe it or not). But I digress.

Anyway, just remember that the “cloud” is just that: a trendy term.

What cloud computing really means is that accessing data can now be done very easily over the Internet, rather than on your computer’s hard drive. So rather than downloading software and tech resources locally, it is available in an overarching network that spans the Internet. This makes life easier for both IT wizards and common folk.

So what does this mean for WordPress users? The four S’s: Speed, Scale, Support, and Security.

WordPress + Cloud = <3

Some bloggers and marketers try to call out hosting companies for making the concept of the cloud seem too “magical”, alluding that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. They’re wrong. WordPress hosting in the cloud is a match made in heaven.

Support: Giving quick, well rounded tech support is simple in the cloud. Diagnosing errors is pretty easy as well with such access. What’s more, if one server on the network crashes, it’s backed up by multiple other sources–meaning no downtime for your precious site.

Scale: Making things cost effective and efficient, the cloud hosting solution for your WP site allows for scalability. This means you can scale any and all of your resources as you go, with complete control of RAM, disk space, CPU cores, and bandwidth.

Speed: Things are just quicker in the cloud. Users lack patience, and with the CDN of a WP site hosted in the cloud, things come at your users quickly, giving them no time to navigate away from your page or move on to some other shiny object.

Did you enjoy this article? We would love to hear your thoughts, so don’t be shy and comment below! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Author information

Igor Ovsyannykov

Igor Ovsyannykov is a 23 year old geek, blogger, and designer. He mostly spends his time working here and sharing resourceful knowledge with others. He also enjoys weight lifting, hanging out with friends, and losing his mind to progressive house music. If you would like to reach him, send him an email to inspirationfeed@yahoo.com

]]>http://inspirationfeed.com/wordpress/tips/wordpress-cloud-hosting-a-match-made-in-heaven/feed/0ThemeFuse Review: Launching a New WordPress Site Is No Longer a Hassle!http://inspirationfeed.com/wordpress/tips/themefuse-review-launching-a-new-wordpress-site-is-no-longer-a-hassle/
http://inspirationfeed.com/wordpress/tips/themefuse-review-launching-a-new-wordpress-site-is-no-longer-a-hassle/#commentsThu, 25 Apr 2013 03:26:53 +0000http://inspirationfeed.com/?p=33328Author information

Igor Ovsyannykov

Igor Ovsyannykov is a 23 year old geek, blogger, and designer. He mostly spends his time working here and sharing resourceful knowledge with others. He also enjoys weight lifting, hanging out with friends, and losing his mind to progressive house music. If you would like to reach him, send him an email to inspirationfeed@yahoo.com

]]>A couple of days ago I was approached to write a product review. However, the offer I got was kind of unusual. Particularly, the co-founder of ThemeFuse reached out to me and asked me to check out their new service and write a honest review. Now, the service in question is offered together by ThemeFuse and WebHostingBuzz. It doesn’t have a particular name, but it’s all about providing a truly easy way of launching a WordPress site from the ground up, even if you’re a complete beginner and have zero experience in this area.

What is it exactly?

Just to give you a quick summary of the whole service, here’s a short elevator pitch: It allows you to pick a theme from ThemeFuse’s gallery and have it installed by their team, on an optimized hosting platform, and under a new domain (of your choosing). From a client’s point of view, this is great because the only thing you have to do is choose a theme and your work is done. Then after a while, you end up with a fully functional WordPress site. Cool, isn’t it?

Who is this for?

The official press release says that it’s for beginners in the WordPress world who don’t want to deal with all the hassle that’s usually involved when building a site. That is true. However, I’d say that it’s also for anyone who simply can’t be bothered to set everything up on their own and would rather have it done by someone else. Hence it’s also a good deal for pro developers and designers.

Does it work?

Here’s the thing, creating a product for beginners is actually really really really hard due to something called the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is, for example, what prevents you from explaining a basic concept of an area that you are an expert in to a complete beginner. In other words, it’s when the scope of your knowledge makes it impossible for you to switch to a beginner state of mind and be able to deliver value in an easy to grasp way.

This is ultimately the reason why no one understands university professors when they try to explain things… And sometimes, it’s also a problem with many “beginner” products in various niches. So today, I want to check if this new service has similar issues or not. This is how I’m going to do this – my original testing method:

The service gets a credit of 10 points to start with.

I’m going to go through the entire setup process and try acting like I’m completely new.

If something isn’t clear, that’s -1 point.

At the end of the test, we’ll have the final score.

The test begins

To take advantage of this new offer, all you have to do is go to ThemeFuse.com and click the promotional banner/bar that’s right at the top of the homepage. When you do so, you’ll be redirected to the official signup page.

Quite a long page, but it explains the main idea behind the service pretty clearly, so it’s surely worth a read. There’s a signup button at the bottom.

After clicking it, you’ll end up straight in the theme gallery, where you can choose whatever theme you like (every theme is included in this new service). After browsing around for a while I’ve decided to go with Conexus.

The sales page for every theme itself is very clear with a visible buy button. But the next step – after clicking this buy button – can cause some problems. It’s an order customization page, and unfortunately, I’m going to have to call “-1″ on that (yeah, let’s keep this review honest). Here’s the problem, this is what this order customization page looks like:

Since I’m interested in the “theme-domain-hosting” package, I clicked the big blue box at the bottom of the screen, which led straight back to the page where I started this whole journey. Not a serious issue, but still a little misleading. Anyway, the thing you should click here is either the BUY STANDARD version button or the BUY DEVELOPER version button (in most cases it’s the former). Okay, let’s do that and see what happens.

Everything is back on track in this step. There’s a very clear confirmation page where you can click the orange button and get started with the new service. The next screen:

This is where you have the possibility to get a new domain along with your package (the domain is optional; you can skip it if you already have one). By the way, if you decide to get a domain, it’s free for the first year. You get to choose from domains under.com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info. After clicking the Review Order button you’ll see the final confirmation page.

This is where you can check if everything is alright, pick a payment method, input a discount code if you have one, and finally proceed to checkout. One more step you have to take care of before the checkout itself is the signup page for a client account at ThemeFuse.

What follows next is a standard PayPal payment procedure (if you’ve selected PayPal as your payment method). I don’t think any screenshots are necessary here… It’s a pretty standard PayPal transaction. Lastly, after successfully completing the transaction you can go back to ThemeFuse (through the link provided inside PayPal). Well, apparently, that’s it for the whole purchase process. All that follows now is an email from ThemeFuse informing you that the site is up and running.

Now here’s the best part. Literally 15 minutes after completing my purchase, my new domain was live, and I could access the site’s Dashboard via the client panel at ThemeFuse.com. Again, that’s 15 minutes. (Note. This is a fully functional WordPress site. So you get unlimited access to the Dashboard, where you can publish posts, pages, create new user accounts, install plugins and so on.)

The good

To be honest, I love everything about this service. It’s clear, the signup form is impressively simple, and the whole idea itself is superb. The main element where this service stands out is its ease of use. You really don’t need any experience in order to handle the signup process. Everyone can do it.

The bad

If you’ve read this closely then you’ve noticed there’s only one “-1″ moment. And to be honest, it wasn’t even that serious. Just a single, little misleading message for people landing on the order page. The signup process itself is so simple that it’s really hard for me to find anything else wrong with it. And believe me, I tried. I even waited for the session to invalidate and did other similarly strange things, but nothing bad happened. More than that, I made my test on Saturday, and even despite this the site was live within 15 minutes.

Plans and pricing

ThemeFuse sells their themes for a variety of price points. The standard range is $49 to $99 for a standard license (there’s also one free theme). The hosting package is $69 a year. In the end, to get started, you need $128 in total, and that’s exactly what I paid during the test.

The bottom line

Let’s compare this service to the traditional way of launching a WordPress site. Usually, you have to do the following things:

Get a domain.

Choose and buy a hosting account.

Connect the two together (not always that simple).

Install WordPress (either by hand or through an auto-installer).

Get a theme and upload it to your hosting account.

Install the theme itself.

With this new service, on the other hand, there’s just one step:

Pick a theme at ThemeFuse and tell them to handle the setup process for you.

I mean, you can’t beat that. I believe that this service truly is the perfect solution for every beginner to get a site as quickly and effortlessly as possible. What do you think? If you decide to take advantage of this service, don’t forget to shot me a message and let me know how it went. Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. We only write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our website. Inspirationfeed may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the products in question. For more information, please read our Terms of Service and Private Policy page.

Author information

Igor Ovsyannykov

Igor Ovsyannykov is a 23 year old geek, blogger, and designer. He mostly spends his time working here and sharing resourceful knowledge with others. He also enjoys weight lifting, hanging out with friends, and losing his mind to progressive house music. If you would like to reach him, send him an email to inspirationfeed@yahoo.com

Igor Ovsyannykov is a 23 year old geek, blogger, and designer. He mostly spends his time working here and sharing resourceful knowledge with others. He also enjoys weight lifting, hanging out with friends, and losing his mind to progressive house music. If you would like to reach him, send him an email to inspirationfeed@yahoo.com

]]>The way WordPress has evolved over the years is really staggering. Originally, the platform was designed as a simple blogging engine. And I do mean simple. Content was organized as posts or pages, and … that was basically it.

Nowadays, however, WordPress allows you to launch any kind of website, and the only limit is your imagination (or skill, or budget).

It wasn’t long before people realized that if they wanted to sell something through a website, instead of hiring web developers and paying them $10,000 or more per project (no joke; I know this because I have some first-hand experience with developers), they could just launch a site on WordPress and then integrate it with various payment solutions for a fraction of the price.

Now, there are a couple of different types of payments you can enable on a WordPress site, so let’s discuss them one by one.

Donations and “by the way” payments

A “by the way” payment happens when a visitor decides to send some money to the website owner for no other reason than to make a donation. There’s no product or service being sold.

Even though this technique hasn’t made anyone rich yet, many people include it on their sites just to cover their hosting and other common costs of running a website.

The easiest way to enable such payments is to integrate your site with PayPal. The plugin I recommend for that is called WP Easy PayPal Payment Accept. It lets you place a PayPal box in the sidebar or inside your posts and pages.

(Apart from donations, you can also use it for product or service sales.)

Standard e-commerce stores

An e-commerce store is simply a website that displays a line of products and enables a shopping cart solution, through which every visitor can pick and purchase the products.

This is probably the most crowded space when it comes to the available WordPress plugins. There are truly some excellent solutions out there, and a lot of them are free.

GetShopped WP e-Commerce. It’s a complete online store platform, which means that it doesn’t require any third party apps or services. It integrates with a number of payment processors like: Google Checkout, PayPal, Payment Express, and more.

The main plugin is free, but there are paid upgrades, in case you ever decide that the default set of features is not enough.

WooCommerce. The plugin is a creation of the guys behind WooThemes. This time, they bring you a complete online store solution, in some ways similar to GetShopped. There’s extensive online payment integration with services like: PayPal, Mijireh, and others.

The plugin is free, but it will certainly work best with a WooThemes’ theme – which are mostly paid.

Direct and recurring payments

The solutions presented above require you to connect with an external payment processor (like PayPal), which will handle all payments for you.

In some cases, it’s better to process payments directly (something we’ve talked about in one of the recent posts). As a merchant, you get more control over your money, don’t have to pay those massive fees, and you can enable automatic recurring payments.

ACH Payments is a solution that lets you do just that. You get to process the payments made by your customers, and you can automate the collection procedure. This comes especially handy if you have any recurring payments, as you no longer have to go back and forth with your customers and remind them to send you a check.

One more important issue with payment processing (from a legal point of view) is that if you’re handling payments yourself, you have to protect and backup the payment data (you can get fined if you don’t). ACH Payments handles this too.

Authorize.netis another solution for direct payments. The company provides tools for fast credit card processing, mobile apps, fraud prevention tools, professional support, and many other services to make your life easier as a merchant.

Auctions and other models

One more individual type of websites dealing with various payments is an auction site. Even though giants like eBay are what comes to mind first when the topic of online auctions get mentioned, many small auction sites exist in various niches and actually make some healthy profits too.

If that’s the site for you then consider WP Auctions. It’s a paid plugin, but it basically turns your WordPress site into a complete online auction platform. There’s a number of bidding engines available, and a load of other features. The plugin integrates with PayPal for payments.

That’s it for my list of payment solutions for your website. Feel free to comment if you have any questions or suggestions for even more ways of handling online payments on WordPress.

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Igor Ovsyannykov

Igor Ovsyannykov is a 23 year old geek, blogger, and designer. He mostly spends his time working here and sharing resourceful knowledge with others. He also enjoys weight lifting, hanging out with friends, and losing his mind to progressive house music. If you would like to reach him, send him an email to inspirationfeed@yahoo.com

Hi this is Brijesh Patel, I am contemporary content writer and digital marketer working for Rightway Solution a New York based IT company providing WordPress and other Open source Web Development services. You can also Hire WordPress Developer at affordable cost on monthly and weekly basis.

]]>WordPress doesn’t get the respect it deserves. In one stroke of imaginative brilliance, it brought to the world, a great blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Building a blog or a top-of-the-line website has never been so easy since WordPress came around and it’s a very popular free open source platform.

It’s estimated that almost 70% of the developers use WordPress for building a blog or website. Tell designers that you want a website built cheap, yet with zero compromises on quality, they will suggest WordPress. Since, the time it made its appearance way back in 2003, it has keep adding to its repertoire, and its various releases have just made this platform bigger and better.

Let’s take a journey through the various WordPress releases and see how these updates revolutionized the way we blog and what we expect from a CMS platform.

Version 0.7 Released on May 7, 2003

Today, only the 0.71 Gold version is officially available for download from the WordPress Release Archives Page, nevertheless there is no doubt that its launch almost 10 years ago started a revolution. Developers could use features like Highly Intelligent Line Breaks, New Administration Interface, Manual Excerpts and New Default Templates, default plugins for better navigations etc. to create websites and blogs that were as good, if not better, than those built with proprietary software.

It can safely be said that the release of WordPress gave everybody who wanted an affordable online presence, the power to dream big, and dream cutting edge.

1.2 Mingus released on May 22, 2004

A year later, theMingus update arrived, which added features like sub categories, for adding categories in a single sub category (great for ecommerce sites); another important addition was encrypted passwords and cookies, which offered better security; advanced comment moderation, was another feature that made blog commenting simpler and spam free; also bloggers could now view their post with the post preview feature; feature liker and Live Journal Importer ensured that blog followers are updated with the latest news from the blog or site. These and other features, further cemented WordPress’s position as a top notch blogging platform.

1.5 Strayhorn and 2.0 Duke Released in 2005

Two updates by the WordPress community in 2005 really set the ball rolling for some great open source website development. The Strayhorn update was more about blog management, managing latest updates, and customization of default templates. The Duke update gave a boost to the WordPress admin panel and made it faster; it offered a feature called Redesigned Backend which offered on- demand customization of the background; other features included spam and backup plugins, resizable editing, streamlined importing and lots more.

2.1 Ella, 2.2 Getz, and 2.3 Dexter Released in 2007

The expectations with WordPress kept growing, and to keep up with the demand, three versions were released in 2007.

Ella offered features like autosave, that saved your post automatically, a new search engine privacy option, that helped you indicate search engines shouldn’t index your blog, more AJAX integration, faster admin and more visual consistency and much more.

Getz was an update that offered security fixes and tried to plug all the big and small holes in the WordPress blog. An important change that it brought to WordPress is that widgets that were available as plugins were now made available in the core and default themes.

The Dexter update focused on next generation features like native tagging support that allowed users to tag their posts, update notification giving info about any plugin or WordPress update, canonical URLs, advance WYSIWYG and more.

2.5 Brecker, 2.6 Tynerand 2.7 Coltrane Released in 2008

Continuing the tradition of releasing a new update every four months, the WordPress community released three more in 2008. The focus here was upgrading the functionality of the platform and offering users a superlative experience. More designing templates made their appearance on the scene; you could now add videos and pictures to the website; and plugins could now get automatically updated through the administration interface.

2.8 Baker Released in 2009

In a break from tradition, only one update released in 2009, which was the 2.8 Baker. The most notable addition offered was that you could now go through the various themes, from the WordPress dashboard. The Theme Browser feature helped you specify columns, width, and color of the theme; redesigned widget interface, bug fixes, better speed, were just some of the many other features of this update.

2.9 Carmen, 3.0 Thelonious Released in 2010

The Carmen update came with features like Global undo/”trash”, allowing you to restore a deleted post or comment from trash; Built-in image editor allowed users to crop, edit, rotate, flip and scale images; better SEO with rel=canonical; easier video embeds wherein, you just need to paste URL for it to convert into an embeded code, and much more.

In the 3.0 Thelonious, features included a new default theme called Twenty Ten; developers had new APIs for easy implementation of headers, menus, post types etc.; new lighter interface; bulk updates, and many more.

3.1 Reinhardt, 3.2 Gershwin and 3.3 Sony Released in 2011

We are now back two three updates in a calendar year, beginning with Reinhardt, with this release the idea was to make WordPress a better CMS platform. Features like redesigned linking workflow, helping easier linking of existing posts and pages; admin bar to access popular dashboard pages quickly; post formats support for simplifying creation of portable tumblelogs; enhanced CMS capabilities for archiving pages for custom content types and many more made this a great CMS platform.

The sole focus of Gershwin was to boost the speed of WordPress and make it lighter. It offered a tight new dashboard design, an HTML 5 new Twenty Eleven theme, a redesigned post editor, distraction free writing or Zen mode, and other great features.

Honoring the Jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, the 3.3 Sonny update offered features like pointer tips to new users of WordPress, better co-editing support, amongst many other improvements. Here the focus was also on ensuring that even tablet users have a satisfying user experience while using WordPress.

And finally, 3.4 Green, 3.5 Elvin released in 2012

3.5 Elvin focuses on offering next generation features like support for Retina Display, a new Twenty Twelve theme, improved image workflow and many more.

End Words

Through its decade of existence, WordPress has continuously made the effort to reinvent itself to suit the needs and demands of users and developers. This has made it into the platform it is today, and I am sure 2013 will see another update/s that will further enhance the features and functionalities of WordPress.

We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feedor follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Author information

Brijesh Patel

Hi this is Brijesh Patel, I am contemporary content writer and digital marketer working for Rightway Solution a New York based IT company providing WordPress and other Open source Web Development services. You can also Hire WordPress Developer at affordable cost on monthly and weekly basis.

Ricardo Figueiredo is the co-founder of Elevated Search, a boutique firm of SEO experts based out of San Diego. Ricardo has over 8 years of experience SEO project management specializing in on-page optimization, link building, and local SEO and conversion optimization.

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With the rise in digital communications and the widespread use of tablets and smartphones, mobile internet is gaining momentum as the preferred way to access the web. Since 2010, mobile usage has increased 500 percent year-to-year with average smartphone usage tripling in that same time. And just over 10 percent of all web page visits are made from a mobile internet connection via smartphone or tablet. Mobile is growing exponentially – it’s even forecasted to surpass desktop internet usage as early as 2015.

With such an emphasis on mobile browsing, there’s no doubt that “responsive design” is at the forefront of every web professional’s mind.

Responsive web design—or “RWD”—ensures your site is visually appealing no matter what kind of environment it confronts. Through CSS media queries, site layouts are rendered depending on what kind of browser is detected whether on desktop, smartphone or tablet. Responsive design is important because it provides the end user with the best possible website experience without the need to squint, pinch, zoom, or exit the site due to a poor experience when accessed via mobile. In other words, responsive design is intelligent because it allows websites to adapt to different environments on-the-fly while providing the best possible visual experience for the end user.

Plugins for Responsive Design

Instantly transform your WordPress based site into responsive design without the typical development costs associated with creating a separate mobile site. These plugins solve common problems associated with mobile browsing such as navigation, photo gallery or video.

2. WP Fluid Images

For basic informational websites, you may only need the WP Fluid Images plugin – an essential tool that removes height and width attributes from graphics placed on pages or posts. It replaces CSS image attributes with fluid percentages instead, allowing for a visually suitable experience whether your site is accessed via mobile or desktop.

3. FitVids jQuery Plugin

Like images, videos can also cause problems due to typical CSS styles that don’t jive with mobile. Videos often result in stifled bandwidth, pinching, zooming or exiting the website entirely. FitVids jQuery plugin solves the issue by resizing videos into fluid form, eliminating the cumbersome experience ordinarily associated with video on mobile.

4. WP Mobile Detect

The WP Mobile Detect plugin solves common problems associated with large files such as photo galleries, chat functions, streaming, graphics and audio that can choke when accessed on smartphones or tablets. Now you can prevent large files from loading on mobile with the use of an easy shortcode.

5. Responsive Select Menu

Navigation and menus can be visually challenging on a mobile device, but the Responsive Select Menu plugin resolves the issue by turning them into a select box instead. The plugin converts WordPress 3.0 menus into responsive select boxes, taking up less real estate on pages without space to spare. It’s easier for the user and works automatically – no extra PHP code is necessary.

We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Author information

Ricardo Figueiredo

Ricardo Figueiredo is the co-founder of Elevated Search, a boutique firm of SEO experts based out of San Diego. Ricardo has over 8 years of experience SEO project management specializing in on-page optimization, link building, and local SEO and conversion optimization.